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Suddenly my MacBook Pro failed to wake up from it’s sleep. I thought it’s one of those problems which gets fixed after a hard reboot, but I was wrong! There’s no display after several power cycles. My MBP is one and half years old and I regretted not buying an apple care. Pressed the power button and turned it on again, it chimes, and after a while I could increase/decrease volume using the keyboard, but there’s no display.

After Googling a for a while I found about MacBook Pros with faulty Nvidia GPU.

Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected. If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within two years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty.

Good - I thought, if that’s the case it’ll be a free repair. My MacBook Pro fitted all the descriptions, but I decided to do some further troubleshooting myself as per apple’s recommendation, tried external display and even changed the RAM (I had the original 2GB RAM, which I’d upgraded few months back to 4GB). Finally called apple, and the support guy asked me to take my MBP to apple store to be seen by a Genius.

I made an appointment with a Genius in Apple Store, Bentall Centre. A friendly Genius took my MBP in to do some test (they’ve a special test for nvidia issue) and came back to tell me that the logic board was faulty. I told him that the OS is actually booting, only the display is not working. Showed him that the volume key works, but he told me that volume key actually works without the OS (but I was not so sure). So, finally he gave me a £771.65 repair estimate quotation for the logic board replacement. I came back with my MBP and was already thinking about buying a new one.

Back at home, I turned on the MBP again and left it on for a while, I could see it joining the wireless access point and could even ping it’s ip address from another pc. At this point I was pretty much convinced that it’s not the logic board but only display problem. I booked another session with Apple Genius, but this time in a different store at White City. Showed my MBP to this Genius, explained him what happens. He said - he’ll need to do one test, booted my MBP using an external hard disk and told me “Yes, it’s a NVIDIA issue, we’ll repair it free of charge”.

So, apple took exactly 2 weeks to repair my MBP, the logic board was replaced. The receipt shows £771.65, but with payment method - “No Charge”. I’m glad to have this fixed free of charge (was nearly duped into paying £771.65 or even buying a new MBP).

If you have a MacBook Pro with display problem it’s very likely to be a NVIDIA issue even if one Genius says it’s not!

I downloaded Windows7 beta on the first day of it’s public release, but didn’t get around trying it. Finally I got a chance to install it today. The installation was smooth and straight forward.

This is how I installed Windows 7 beta on my Mac with Vmware Fusion.

Download

The 2.44 GB ISO file can be downloaded from Windows7 beta download page. It took me around 2 hours to download it using my 8MB home broadband. You’ll also be given a Windows 7 Beta Product Key together with the download to activate windows 7.

Create New Virtual Machine

Create a new virtual machine by launching the Vmware Fusion and going to FIle–>New

Click on Continue without disk, because we’ll be using the ISO image to install Windows 7.

Then, click on Use operating system installation disk image file and select the Windows 7 ISO file downloaded earlier.

Choose the Operating System. I had downloaded the 64 bit version so, I chose Windows Vista x64 Edition.

Enter the Account Name, Password and the Windows Product Key

I don’t need file sharing at the moment so, I disabled the windows sharing by choosing None.

Default config of the new virtual machine. I wanted to give more RAM to the new vm so, clicked on Customize Settings

This is where you can customize the hardware settings for your virtual machine. Click on Processors & RAM to increase the RAM size.

Increase the RAM to 2048MB (2GB)

Click on the play button to begin installation

The installation starts…

After couple of reboots and an approximately half an hour later it’s done.

The installation was seamless and I’m planning to use Window 7 for some time next week to see how good it is. The immediate next thing is an anti-virus. Complimentary McAfee anti-virus provided by vmware fusion is not compatible with Windows 7 yet, and a quick google showed Kaspersky, so I might install that.

Apple has finally announced the long awaited SDK for iPhone. Looking at the amazing games and enterprise softwares that third party were able to develop in just two weeks I’m convinced that iPhone will be an excellent gaming machine as well as a hit enterprise handheld device. The next release of iPhone firmware version 2.0 due to be released in June will have native Exchange support, Cisco IPSec VPN, remote wipe capabilities, WPA2, and many more…

Here’s a nice iPhone SDK comparison chart by engadget.

Another good news for iPhone users in UK is that BBC has launched iPlayer video on demand service for the iPhone and iPod touch. I just watched the BBC News on my iPhone and it’s just awesome!

After upgrading to Leopard I’m experiencing random keyboard freezes in my MacBook Pro. It’s very annoying! After a quick Google I found many people having the same problem.

Leopard is sleek and polished with some great new features, but it’s not as stable as Tiger. Besides the keyboard issue, it fails to shutdown or reboot time to time. The finder hangs and need to shutdown pressing the power button.

Hopefully Apple will acknowledge and address these issues soon.

Update: Apple finally released this Software Update to fix the freezing keyboards.

Finally got my hands on the iPhone today!

We’ve all watched/read so much about the iphone and it’s coolness that expectations were quite high. And I’ve to say that I was not disappointed. It’s really cool, slim and gorgeous. Most of the things work perfect. I think the keyboard is not an issue.

iPhone was launched today at 6:02pm in UK and could be bought in Apple Stores, O2 stores or Carphone Warehouse stores. You’ll have to sign 18 months contract with O2, which is the exclusive carrier in UK.

There’s one Carphone Warehouse store few blocks away from my house, so I went to check out at 6pm. Surprisingly there were just around 20 people queuing up. The store opened at 6:02 and everybody was let in. But there was a problem with carphone warehouse’s payment system. I’m not sure if the system was flooded by iPhone transaction or other technical issues. Anyway, it took more than half an hour just for the payment authorization. I was the first one to walk out of that store with the iPhone. They authorized the payment manually, bypassing the chip and pin (security system in UK’s bank cards).

Activating iPhone with iTunes was a smooth and painless process. I am currently using Vodafone, and got the PAC code from them few days ago. PAC code is a special code to transfer your mobile number from one provider to another. My existing mobile number will be automatically transferred to my iPhone after 7 days, until then O2 has assigned me a temporary number. That was clever.

Played with most of its features, made several calls (quality is quite good) and tested the visual voice mail (which should be very useful). Synced my address book, music, podcasts, some photos and videos. iPod is excellent. Gmail and IMAP mails are easy to configure and work without any problem. Photos are very cool, flipping them, zooming in/out, resizing was fun. Google Maps will be very useful for me finding places in London, it loads pretty fast even on EDGE Network.

Only problems are the Wi-Fi connection and YouTube. I use a 128bit WEP HEX Key at home and couldn’t establish connection with my Access Point. Quick Google gave me this (seems to be a known issue) but using $ in front doesn’t solve the problem for me. For the YouTube Videos It says that it requires an EDGE or Wi-Fi connection.

I think these two problems can be fixed easily.

I’m just having a good time playing with it. You’ve to hold it and use it to really appreciate it. It was a nice Deepawali gift for myself!

I’ve just upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard. I expected it to be very smooth and painless as many other users have reported, but unfortunately I encountered some problem. I had to spend around extra 4 hours, and was worried about losing my data all the way until the upgrade was complete.

So, this is what happened. I inserted my Leopard DVD and clicked on Install Mac OS X, then my MBP restarted. I chose the option to Upgrade (it actually detected and told me that I wanted to upgrade). It took around 2 hours to complete and asked for a final restart. That was supposed to be the end of upgrade, but after the final restart my MBP was stuck on white screen with apple logo. I waited for half an hour, then it became obvious that nothing was happening, so I pushed the power button and re-started again, which led to the same white screen. At this point I was quite worried about my data. I had done my last backup 2 months ago. Actually I should have backed up before starting the upgrade, but I thought since everyone is doing it smoothly why would I have a problem? Also I was too excited to experience the Leopard that I didn’t want to spend time backing up, and neglected the risk of losing 2 months data.

Stuck in the white screen forever

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Snort has always been, and still is my favorite IDS (Intrusion Detection System) although I manage many UTM (Unified Threat Management) Firewalls with built in IPS/IDS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention) now. The commercial UTM Firewalls with IPS/IDS are easy to use and configure but they come with a high price tag and aren’t easy to customize. Even though snort is not that easy to install, configure and manage it still is the most popular IDS/IPS today because of the fact that it is open source, free, easily customizable, easy to create rules, signatures are always kept up-to-date by its community and plenty of excellent documentation, guides and books.

Snort captures enormous amount of data from the network and generates alert based on the rules and signatures. There’re currently 3 excellent and relatively user friendly ways to manage and analyze the snort data:
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Mac OSX Leopard - The latest and greatest Mac OS X, major features unveiled. New Desktop, Finder, Time Machine, Spaces, Quick Look and many more…

Safari for Windows - The sleek and fast apple browser comes to Windows world. I’ve installed it in my windows machine and surfed for a while. The first impression is that, it’s faster than both IE7 and Firefox, but at the same time it’s buggier, in an hour browsing it crashed twice (it’s currently in beta and I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon).

iPhone to Support Third-Party Web 2.0 Applications - So, Apple is allowing the developers to make iPhone apps and host them on their own servers. iPhone is using full Safari-based browser.

WWDC 2007 Keynote (QuickTime Video on Demand) - Watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil and demo Leopard features in his World Wide Developer Conference keynote address from San Francisco’s Moscone West.

Go and download a free DivX Pro for Mac by giving your email address. The license will be sent to your email address. No word on why they’re giving it for free, but who cares. It’s a good chance to get an excellent video player worth 20 bucks for free. I’ve already downloaded and installed mine. Act quickly!

Via: macenstein

Macrumors noted, Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz announcing that Apple would be making ZFS the default filesystem in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. That’s a great news. So, welcome pooled storage and bye-bye volumes!

ZFS stands for Zettabyte File System and was developed by Sun, it offers many advanced features and can handle much more space than the current filesystems used by Windows, OS X or Linux.

ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.

All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS filesystem, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS will detect it and use another copy to repair it.

ZFS introduces a new data replication model called RAID-Z. It is similar to RAID-5 but uses variable stripe width to eliminate the RAID-5 write hole (stripe corruption due to loss of power between data and parity updates). All RAID-Z writes are full-stripe writes. There’s no read-modify-write tax, no write hole, and — the best part — no need for NVRAM in hardware. ZFS loves cheap disks.